A few years ago, people started realizing that 3D printers and small CNC mills were going to revolutionize not just general manufacturing, but firearms manufacturing in particular. How can the government regulate firearms, when you can simply print one – or a dozen – up in your own home?

A small CNC mill, designed expressly to be able to mill out AR-15 receivers, is a perfectly legal device. It’s just a complex power tool. You don’t need to have any sort of license to own or operate such a thing. But FedEx and UPS have decided to chicken out on shipping them because they are afraid that they will be set upon by the government.

Couple this with the Obama administrations recent realization that while it cannot infringe on the freedom of the press it can ban ink, things are starting to look interesting in the world of organized gun-grabbing.

This is neat… a photographer took some shots of the original Star Trek USS Enterprise filming model (currently removed from its gift-shop dungeon for some much needed restoration and improved displaying) and used those photos to replace Movie Enterprise in various scenes. And… it’s pretty awesome.

Note the two bright “specks” within a single crater. Almost certainly the extremely bright appearance of the specks is due to the overall dim nature of the surroundings… something doesn’t need to be too terribly bright to look *blindingly* bright compared to dark surroundings. I’d bet a nickle that we’re seeing ice at the bottom of the crater.

I much prefer this sort of display to even the most detailed computer rendering printed out onto foam core. Perhaps as 3D printing gets better & cheaper we’ll see a return to this sort of thing. Imagine if you could print off aluminum & plexi large-size models like this for a few bucks worth of raw materials and electricity…

A PDF pieced together from scans found on the Secret Projects forum of Senate testimony on the AIM-95 Agile air-to-air missile. Agile was, as the name might suggest, a close-in “dogfighting” missile, an attempt to incorporate the hard lessons learned by the USAF and USN getting their tails kicked in the skies over Viet Nam by scrappy Russian dogfighters pilots by scrappy Vietnamese pilots. The main advantage that the Agile provided over the Sidewinder was that the infra-red seeker was capable of looking further off boresight… in other words, you didn’t need to point the plane at the enemy before the missile could get a lock-on. While the AIM-95 Agile apparently worked just fine, it was simply cheaper to upgrade the Sidewinder.

The AIM-95 would be steered via vectoring the nozzle rather than aerodynamic control fins. Initial targeting was planned to be done by having a sight integrated into the pilots helmet.. where he looked, the missile looked. The AIM-95 was intended for use by the F-14 and then the F-15 as well, but it never entered service.

“Ninety per cent of pregnant French women use homeopathy. Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart.

“And, yes, I have helped fellow MPs. I do foresee that one day astrology will have a role to play in healthcare.”

I looked this dumbass up on Wikipedia. Apparently he’s for real. And apparently his interest in BS “alternative medicine” is real and not new:

Tredinnick supports alternative medicine including homeopathy and chiropractic.[9] In October 2009, he told Parliament that blood does not clot under a full moon; a spokesperson for the Royal College of Surgeons of England warned his colleagues would “laugh their heads off” at the suggestion.[10] In the same debate, Tredinnick characterised scientists as “racially prejudiced“.[9]

Health journalist Victoria Lambert has interpreted Health Minister Jeremy Hunt’s call for traditional Chinese medicine to be available on the NHS as an endorsement of Tredinnick’s call for integrated alternative healthcare. Tredinnick claims that “herbal medicine is not quackery”, is cost-effective and, unlike Western medicine, has been used for thousands of years in China.[11]

In July 2013, Tredinnick sponsored an Early Day Motion congratulating a farmer for his decision to use homeopathy.

The National Air and Space Museum is, at last, working on restoring their Ho 229. The 229 was an interesting flying wing jet fighter built in Germany during WWII; it had great potential, but as with most such things its legend has been blown far out of proportion, with recent years seeing claims that it was designed as a radar-stealthy fighter (it almost certainly wasn’t) and that it was the source of the postwar Flying Saucer mythology (difficult to envision since none seem to have survived the war in flyable condition).

A website has been set up to document the restoration of the Ho 229. The plane needs a lot of work… construction was of welded steel tubing covered with plywood. The years have not been kind to the plywood.

A friend of mine is looking for a story she remembers reading in something like second grade… would have been in the late 1970’s. As she remembers it, there was a steel mill or ironworks or foundry or some such. In it worked a man made out of iron or iron ore. He *may* have been named “Bill,” but that’s uncertain. One day the place encountered some sort of trouble… ran out of iron at just the worst possible moment. If they didn’t get their work done, Very Bad Things would result. So, “Bill” apparently sacrificed himself to save the factory by tossing himself into the furnace, or something. Yay, hasta la vista baby.

The lesson seems obscure at best, dubious at worst, but if anyone knows the story, please advise.

Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* […]

So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing: 1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US. 2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like […]

Yes, I’ve posted these before. But I feel it’s important for everyone to maintain a proper level of understanding of the encabulator, the turbo-encabulator and the retro-encabulator. And of course once you have an encabulator, you’ll need to diagnose it from time to time: There have of course been advances in the field […]

Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again. One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed […]

Oh, boy! Mayhem! A Group Of 62 Catholics Has Accused The Pope Of Spreading Heresy Not being Catholic, I have no dog in this fight. Still, it’s always entertaining when religious leaders tell other religious leaders they’re wrong. Wacky hijinks often ensue.

So, Star Trek Discovery plopped onto the airwaves tonight. My review: It was certainly pretty, but all those visuals were spoiled by a whole lot of “WTF am I looking at?” Especially with the “Klingons” who bore almost no relationship to any prior iteration of the Klingons, in biology, aesthetics or culture. Heck, they even […]

… in a drone: This is pretty much exactly the sort of footage that would have been impossible to get prior to the current generation of drones. So just imagine what people will be able to film once the batteries for drones are actually *good,* with the power and energy density of chemical fuels like […]

OK, let’s say your town is plagued by a transdimensional monster that takes the form of a killer psychotic clown. Who would be the best person to try to destroy this menace? That’s right, the goddamn Batman: And because why not: Bill Nye just walked into our elevator while I was snap chatting.. pic.twitter.com/LwCOITAEft […]

A deli worker was attacked, someone came across the counter and slashed at him with a knife. He fought back with a knife of his own, and the other guy got the worse of it. So, what happened? Did the city of New York throw the deli worker a ticker tape parade? Give him the […]